banks of the Susquehannah.  Though Lamb wondered at the speculations of Coleridge, and, loving him, loved the metaphysics which were a part of him, yet it was without changing his own essentially opposite disposition.  Lamb clung to the earth.  He cultivated the excellency of this life.  He was concrete, and hugged the world as he did his sister.  He reverently followed the discourses of Coleridge, admiring, perhaps, “the beauty of the words, but not the words themselves”; but when the Opium-Eater also began to take speculative flights before Lamb, the latter stopped him at once by jangling his metaphysics into jokes.  It was in conversation with Coleridge, begun at school and continued afterward at frequent meetings, that Lamb first ventured to try his own powers and was prompted to literary activity.  But for a slight defect in his speech, he would probably have followed Coleridge to the University with the intention of going into the Church.  A delightful clergyman he would have been, if he had duly undertaken the office, and one would have walked far to see him in the priestly robe, to hear him chant the service, to receive pastoral advice from him; yet we fear the “Essays of Elia” would have been less admirable than now.  He was roused by Coleridge; and though he could not put the aureole of the latter about his own head, he began to do the best he could in his own way.

Life is a play between accident and purpose.  Why was it, that, of all the books in the world, Charles Lamb should have fixed his affections chiefly on the old English dramatists?  He might have turned to old Greece, admired the fruits of the classic ages, and become one of those sparkling artistic Hellenists that are occasionally seen in modern times.  He might have turned to the mediaeval period.  He had an eye for cloisters and nuns.  His fancy would have been struck with the grotesqueness of many of the ideas and institutions of those times.  He would have got on finely with Gurth the swineherd and Burgundy the tusk-toothed, and one of his masterly witticisms would have upset Duns Scotus.  Perhaps, of all the mediaeval characters, he would have been most smitten with the court fool, and, if he could have been seated at a princely table of the twelfth century, the bowl surely would not have been round many times before he and the fool would have had a few passes at each other.  There was enough in the Middle Ages to have fascinated him; and could he, like some romantic Novalis, have once penetrated thither, and tasted the fruit, he would have found it a lotus, and would have wished never to depart.  His soul would have clung to church architecture,—­under which term may be included all the religious, political, poetical, moral, and practical life of the Middle Ages.  The accident in the case, however, was, that his uncle’s library did not contain the Greeks, nor the Middle Ages, but did contain the old English authors.  These he mastered; and out of these he created his